Friday, March 04, 2016

RIGHT ARM, MY FOOT!

Amazing, how long you can store pain without feeling it. Take my right arm, for example. And don’t say I never gave you anything. When I get my rehab massages, the painless arm blossoms into amazing and colorful waves of “welcome” pain, the kind I can appreciate, that I’d had no idea I was blithely carrying around. I’d been kept ignorant of it through the benign graces that have always known their body stuff right down to the ground.

As of now, it’s been about 18 months since my brain short-circuited in a minor way, randomly scrambling the communication routes originally divided between the limbs on my right side, which are now blended in a curious new arrangement and must be reaccommodated, adjusted, built upon and redirected by a select crew of innate nervous system and other operative entities who are complete strangers to me, using unknown algorithmic systems I embody but am not in charge of, thank goodness; I’ve always been inattentive to the principles of higher corporeal math.

These cryptic entities are now busy trying to reconfigure the new situation, so I wisely remain aside; I can feel them colluding and assembling in there, working day and night, making way-in-my-head decisions regarding things that even science has no inklings of. It is best not to interfere as though I know what I am doing; when a limb is ready to make a move, it will do so-- and thereby inform me of its success. It’s a nice series of surprises. I’ve never really “known” how to operate a limb anyway, and this is not the time to start, except in the most basic of ways; best leave the fine details to the corporeal experts that were me long before I was.

These nameless entities, which have been carrying out such complex tasks for eons and to which I am newly thankful, have generated a number of miracle-level surprises along my way, the most surprising (and informative) to me being that it’s going on without me-- it doesn’t need yours truly much at all, when I’m the de facto boss, but who the hell do I think I am, anyway. I go along with it all-- not that I have a choice. So what if a hand thinks like a foot for a while now and then?

3 comments:

amazing and colorful waves of “welcome” pain. the word 'waves' reminds me of the time when I was in labor w/my 3rd... the contractions coming and going... the baby traveling thru my pelvis.. yep, I could feel my pelvis give way... people say the pain of labor is horrendous.. call me crazy, w/3 pregnancies under my belt, the 'pain' was momentary and yes, I did welcome it..I enjoyed the experience.the body is amazing isn;t it? what it accepts and how it handles it surprises me.

About Me

Born and raised in upstate New York, traveled for a decade after college, lived in various places around the world, keeping a journal. Settled in Kyoto in 1980, moved to this mountainside above Lake Biwa in 1995. Started Pure Land Mountain in April 2002.
Written and sidebar contents 2002~2015 copyright Robert Brady